Tuesday, November 6, 2007

If you want to get a glimpse of a Joseph Stalinyou likely had never conceived of
before, just turn to the mug shot taken of him by Tsarist police in 1912 --
opp. p 62 in Sebag Montefiore's fascinating, radically revisionist new
biography, "Young Stalin" (2007).

This Stalin is no repulsively pock-marked yellow-eyed dwarf
-- as Leon Trotsky, who enacted enduring literary revenge on the man who exiled
and executed him, described his foe. Nor does he remotely resemble the
dull-witted bureaucrat of Trotskyite lore, a man who sat out the 1905
Revolution, for example, pushing papers in an office. (He happened to be
tossing grenades at the time).